


Memories Untold

by BeastOfTheSea



Category: Etrian Odyssey Series, 新・世界樹の迷宮 ミレニアムの少女 | Etrian Odyssey Untold: The Millennium Girl
Genre: Amnesia, Angst, Flashbacks, Gen, What-If
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-15
Updated: 2015-08-15
Packaged: 2018-04-14 20:19:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,872
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4578546
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BeastOfTheSea/pseuds/BeastOfTheSea
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Time damages memories. A millennium damages memories beyond what can be healed.</p>
<p>/Not strictly canon./</p>
            </blockquote>





	Memories Untold

**Author's Note:**

> I was surprised matters didn't turn out this way, honestly... Hm. Obviously my knowledge of JRPG plots is not what it once was.
> 
> **Disclaimer:** Etrian Odyssey and all related material is owned by ATLUS. I merely write fanfiction.

Her memory still ached in the places worn away by the coldsleep.

If she struggled with that, she could call back memories of discussions of what might occur. She had accepted her duty with full knowledge of the consequences.

( _You have to know this gun better than you know your own name. Shoot to kill, shoot to disable, shoot to distract..._ )

( _World... won't be... you know. Pollution... mutation... grotesque. Monsters. M.I.K.E. will... what he can. But..._ )

( _So... of you. My little girl. Be strong... All look forward... Your goal in your sights. ...we..._ )

Her training had worked well - too well. She fought with military precision, standing as an equal to hardened adventurers. She recalled all she needed in order to assist M.I.K.E. She adapted skillfully and swiftly to an utterly alien world.

Yet - she'd lost the memory of Ricky. Faintly, she knew her mother had perished before she entered coldsleep - and she was sure she had mourned her. But she could not remember mourning her mother, and the place where the grief should have been was as cold and empty as her now-vacant capsule. Nor did she have any memories with which to try to reconstruct it - she did not recall her mother's face, nor the sound of her mother's voice.

She remembered the stunning blow of her father's absence, too, and the way none of the other scientists had been forthcoming when she tried to find out what had happened to him - but his face was a fog, an abstract image of a gruff, bearded man who could be any one of a thousand gruff, bearded men, and she could not remember more about him. Her parents were faded photographs glimpsed through frosted glass. The rest of the people from her era were even less.

Herself among them. What had... what had she once liked? What had she wanted to be, before the Yggdrasil Project became serious and she came to understand that no career would be more important than serving the future? What had been her hobbies? Had she had any friends? Had she been childish? Mature? Ambitious? Lazy? What had she...

It didn't matter now, she guessed. Whatever was lost in her memories had been left to the coldsleep. She had been warned that the process was imperfect and uncertain, and random areas of brain damage might result. She was just glad she could still write her own name. If she had to give up some part of her mind, she supposed memories of a time one thousand years past were the cheapest price anyone could hope for.

Still, she mourned. And -

"Meet Chieftain Visil."

\- sometimes something _flashed_ across her mind, like a meteor, and then was gone.

Sometimes... it seemed like something that should have been important.

* * *

 

Visil scowled as he watched the five Guild members walk away. They knew too much. They were too good. Ren and Tlachtga, at least, had been intercepted young and proved receptive to an understanding of Yggdrasil's importance. Thus they had gone from a liability to his most trusted servants.

These fools, on the other hand, seemed reckless and prone to advancing much too quickly. He swore they had been registered less than a year ago, and now - appalling. Some guilds went for years without progressing so far, and that had been without the... difficulties... recently occurring. Had he not known better, he might have thought that Yggdrasil was turning unusually hostile, and beginning to be more of a threat than a benefit. After all, there was more than one tree in this world, and the system _could_ afford the loss of a contamina-

_Nggh..._ No. Yggdrasil was fine. The system suffered fluctuations, but that was nothing more than statistical variance. Some eras had been unusually benevolent, and he had been forced to play it very rough as he pitted one guild of adventurers against another to prevent them prying too deep. Other eras - well, he didn't remember the sheer _number_ of hostile and maddened creatures appearing within the labyrinth, but there had certainly been times when Etria had demanded more lives than others. Some colleague of his, in an eon long-past, had been fond of chanting a rather sardonic phrase to sum up the Yggdrasil Project's progress and failsafes... How exactly had he put it? _Blood makes the grass grow, rah rah rah._

Horribly uncouth. But apt.

Yggdrasil was _not_ contaminated. The forest folk, however, seemed to have become so. He could not fathom why, but he supposed they might simply have become defective due to genetic drift or some other error. Perhaps a guild had brought in some harmless cold that, in their inhuman physiology, manifested as brain-rotting madness. Oh well, nothing to be done about it now. All components of the project, aside from Yggdrasil itself, were nonessential. That was the beauty of a complex and redundant plan. Worn-out components could be thrown away without a care in the world. 

Though they did have to be disposed of thoroughly. That was what had led to humanity's problems in the first place, was it not? Failure to carefully dispose of waste?

Well, he would dispose of this waste. He would pit these upstarts against the forest folk, let one side eliminate the other, and send Ren and Tlachtga to clean up the survivors. They would not fail. He had trained them better than that, and he did not pick failures.

The girl bothered him, but he supposed he couldn't remember every little twiddling failsafe the Yggdrasil Project had installed. He had a thousand years of memories piled on top of that, after all. It was a wonder he remembered his original time at all.

( _"Sir -" A pause. After all this time, he still remembered the pause. "You are either the greatest man I have ever known, or the most cold-blooded bastard I've ever had the displeasure to meet."_

_He'd barked out a laugh. "Why not both? Surely you realize-"_ )

He remembered enough to know that life had always been this way for him. Once he'd gotten serious, he'd meant.

Once he'd been soft - had a wife and child. He remembered nothing more of the wife save that she'd existed. He supposed that made him a monster, by human standards, but humans were children. His role as leader, and then as immortal, had forced him to set aside childish things. And should any human contest him on that - as though he would even allow some imbecile the knowledge of what he'd lost - he would ask them what good weeping would do to bring his wife back. Because, even if he could not now recall it, he remembered that he had once had _ample_ opportunity to give that thought.

As for the child...

...

...couldn't have been important. His duties encouraged him to think of something else. He tried to remember what the child had been like - he had vague memories of a girl. He -

Oh, why was he bothering _now_? That child had been a thousand years in the past. He would not be surprised to learn that it had died along with his wife. Certainly, all his colleagues had died as the project neared its completion, and he, already bound irrevocably to Yggdrasil, could only watch as they sickened from poisoned water, grew cancerous and deformed from a contaminated world, and choked on polluted air...

It must have been the sight of this coldsleep lab-rat that triggered such thoughts. But she was an irrelevant curiosity. Everything would progress as it had before. If she had the sense to prize Yggdrasil's welfare as she should, she might even be an asset. But if she stood against Yggdrasil -

She would die like the traitor to her species she was. As all would die who stood against Yggdrasil, whether they knew of their treachery or not. Ignorance was no excuse.

In this era, there was no God but Yggdrasil, and he was one with that God.

* * *

 

_"To look upon millennia and take that burden upon yourself knowingly - is more than I can fathom. But to condemn your daughter to a similar responsibility?"_

_"And who better? Time is running out. We do not have_ time _for sentimentality."_

_"Does she even know you've selected this role for her?"_

_"No more than she knows what I will be doing."_

_"You're completely heartless."  
_

_"Rather, I'm compassionate. I will not tell her and grieve both of us with her childish, futile attempts to make me stay and not leave her alone. As far as she knows, I will simply disappear one day. Distressing, but I would be far from the first. Heaven knows we have lost enough of our best to... Regardless. Furthermore, she will_ not _be alone. She will have M.I.K.E. to comfort her."_

_"M.I.K.E. - who can think of_ nothing _but the project's success, whatever genteel finesse anyone's put into his social interface, because that's all he's ever been programmed to be."_

_"You catch on."_

_"You are the coldest son-of-a-bitch I've ever met."_

_"Insulting my mother will not distract from the seriousness of the matter."_

_"I'd hope your mother would be disgusted by what you're doing to her grandchild."_

_"Desperate times call for desperate measures, as the hackneyed saying goes. And I'd like you to consider what I'm 'doing to her grandchild' if Yggdrasil_ does _wholly succeed and Gungnir turns out to be unnecessary. Alone of all of us here today, my daughter will live, and sleep peacefully through the long and hideous years of decontamination - and awaken in a world as lush and pristine as prehistory. More so, possibly. It will be her privilege to live in a new Eden. What father, in this world, can give his daughter anything more?"_

_"And if Gungnir is needed, as it almost certainly will be, it will be her responsibility to navigate a hostile and unpredictable environment - who even knows what this world will look like in one thousand years? - with neither combat nor life experience, authorize the deployment of a superweapon, and - haven't you thought this through, Visil? If you are one with Yggdrasil, and she-"_

_"Yes." A mirthless chuckle. "But you must admire the symmetry of it, must you not? It's almost poetic. One of us must become Yggdrasil, and one must be the one to put an end to it. The child succeeds the father, the old generation is succeeded by the new."_

_"You - understand, then."_

_"Yes. Indeed, it's part of what cemented my decision. I can think of none better to carry out this task than Ric- Frederica. The stewardship of Yggdrasil will be a family duty. And it is part of that stewardship that it is better for Yggdrasil to perish than to fall to pollution and madness."_

_"Even if Yggdrasil is you? You're a colder-blooded bastard than even I thought, Visil. You don't even see_ yourself _as anything more than a puppet in your own game. To be perfectly frank, you - you_ frighten _me."_

_"It is my duty, as head of this project, to make the decisions that frighten other men. And that's Dr. Irving to you."_

(...And my duty to see them through to their bitter end.

Whatever that may be.)

**Author's Note:**

> We never do find out what happened to Frederica's father. Nor do we find out Visil's last name. 
> 
> The original Etrian Odyssey states "The researcher lost his teammates, and soon after that, his wife and child..." and thereafter fused with Yggdrasil, but Untold's Story Mode changes the plot elsewhere (most notably with sentient!Yggdrasil) - I assumed that the "child" had been developed into Frederica. Having taken care to avoid spoilers, I was actually baffled when I got to Etreant and this _wasn't_ a big reveal. 
> 
> Myself, I think things make a bit more sense with the headcanon that she was his daughter. (Why was she specifically selected as the sole survivor, for one? She may have volunteered, but they could have easily chosen an adult, someone more dedicated to Gungnir's ends-justify-means purpose, or both. But if she was the project head's only child - the project head who had taken it upon himself to see the project to its conclusion, even if that took _a thousand years or more_ \- it seems a bit clearer...) Even without it, I find it... odd... that Frederica has no memory of the project's head and he has no memory of the girl whose purpose was to activate Gungnir. Really? Something's fishy here. I've seen Untold criticized for altering the story too _much_ , but this is a case where it didn't alter it _enough_. 
> 
> It's such a large omission, in fact, that I'll suppose it's semi-deliberate and project onto it what I want to see. I mean, the only logical reason one would brush over an omission as glaring as _that_ is if one was hiding something more than was obvious. Not that JRPGs are necessarily logical, but... even though it would require severe mutual amnesia to work, it _does_ make an unnerving amount of sense when I think about it...
> 
> It's 4:32 AM and I'm rambling. :P Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this fic!


End file.
